Pariah Dog Farm

We visited Pariah Dog Farm in Falmouth recently.

Yes, we'll have wind chills in the single digits overnight, but we refuse to let go of Autumn.

All the cool kids make it to the P Dog.

We heartily recommend going to a farm for your pumpkin needs, rather than plucking one out of a bin at the Wal-Mart. The chicken and the bunny below both agree.

This was a big ol' bunny, maybe the size of a beagle.

Cock o' the walk...

I made it 51 years being completely unaware that chickens eat carrots and peppers.

...and pumpkins.

Apples are out of their vertical range.

They have peppers for humans, too.

I don't really like eggplants, but if a riot started at the farm stand, eggplants look like they'd be good to deck a sucker with.

A peck of peppers

I have no jokes about radishes.

Top Car Crash Locations On Cape Cod

Cape Cod is very traffic-driven, as most tourist places tend to be. I lived in Duxbury and Monponsett, and neither one counted traffic as a major town issue. Bourne, where I live now, is dominated by our traffic. Our traffic dictates how residents live their lives on several days of the week, especially in summer.

Our traffic is unique compared to other towns, in that we get people from other states in large volume. Pull out onto Rte. 28, and you'll be surrounded by Massholes,  smattering of New Yorkers, some Connecticuts, a few northern Yankees, and a mixed nuts ensemble of people from various other states and countries.

These people are dumped onto a variety of Suicide Alleys, make-your-own-law rotaries, narrow bridges, visibility-cluttering business districts and windy cow paths.

Of course they are going to crash into each other now and then.

The Cape Cod Commission was nice enough to post some stats on accidents that occur on Cape Cod roads. They gathered stats by Number Of Accidents, Property Damage, Crash Rate and Property Damage rate. Long story short, they tell you where you are most likely to have an accident on Cape Cod.

The info is old (2010, updated  in 2012), so take anything we say here more as a guideline than as current, absolute truth. The numbers themselves are small enough that a good multiple car crash or two could suddenly jack a middling contender up the rankings into a Trump-like leadership slot.

Rather than slogging through 100 entries with me trying to riff on particular roads, we'll just cherry-pick good stuff for you.

- Remember, the Cape and Islands lay claim to one of America's most notorious car crashes... the Chappaquidick bridge departure that essentially put a ceiling of "Senator" on post-JFK Camelot.

- I don't know which car crash would be the most notorious in American history.

James Dean's death was huge. Jayne Mansfield's scalping is why those little bars on the lower rear end of big trucks are called "Mansfield bars." Lady Diana ate some car parts as a last meal, but that was in Old England (editor's note: France), not New England.

I'm sure that if some drunk smashed into a church group bus somewhere sometime, that would get up in the rankings, even sans celebrities. I know what "affluenza" is because of a car crash.

Sam Kinison died in a car wreck, as did Paul Walker. Dale Earnhardt Sr. (even I, a non-NASCAR fan, refer to this man conversationally as "Dale Senior") and Kenny Irwin Jr also died in the saddle.

Any Southern snowfall threatens to add to the list.

- I also found this map with little dots representing car crashes. Just looking at that, you get the sense that the worst spot is the run of Route 28 from Falmouth through Yarmouth. Hyannis, which actually owns cluster-dots, rules the roost.

- Suicide Alley is not impressive at all on this map.

- I consider shattered brake light glass to be a viable addition to a sea-glass collection, as long as the glass somehow made it to the ocean and then the beach somehow.

- These maps need to be viewed in the Gestalt to get the true vibe. There are differences between a love tap and a crash that, say, drowns your secretary. There are also highly-used roads that have lots of accidents, but you then see side streets representing hard if they feature a tricky intersection.

- No one, to my knowledge, has managed to drive off of the Sagamore or Bourne Bridges. Some old-schooler may be able to contest this claim, however.

- Our leader for Number Of Crashes is Route 6, the Mid-Cape Highway. Various sections of this road hold #1,4,5,6 and 7 spots in the Total Crashes rankings.

- Exit 6 on Route 6 (sorry, I don't know which direction) had 128 crashes in this period of measurement. The next highest, Exit 9, only had 99. You're dropping into the 50s and 40s before you leave the top fifteen.

- Bourne, which is the feeder tube for Cape Cod, represents hard. This is even more of a truth when you start getting into Rates rather than Totals. Bourne has the #3, 8, 9 and 13 spots in Number Of Crashes rankings. Her spot with the most crashes is the Otis Rotary.

- I could be wrong, but the rotary Most Crash rankings go the Otis Rotary, the Bourne Bridge Rotary, the Belmont Circle Rotary (Bourne owns the top 3 most dangerous rotaries on Cabo Coddo), the Airport Rotary and the Eastham Rotary.

- Sandwich Road is a dangerous place, even after I realize that there's one in Falmouth, too.

- Yarmouth moves up in the rankings once you factor in property damage costs. Hyannis and Bourne wreck more cars, but the outer Cape wrecks nicer cars.

- Property damage costs also may be where Suicide Alley asserts herself. They only had 36 deaths there in 10 years or so, but they were head-on, total-the-car sort of deaths. I don't have a Fatality list for all of Cape Cod, which is where Sue might also assert herself.

-  Crash Rate is where the rankings get shook up. It is my opinion- and remember, I just started studying this stuff a few hours ago- that Crash Rate is the best indicator of a dangerous road. Busier roads have more accidents, but they might not be as dangerous.

- The Otis Rotary seizes the top spot for Crash Rate, knocking Exit/Route 6 down to 3rd place. Little-used (17 accidents) Route 39 is second. Route 124 is 5th.

- The exit in Sandwich at Chase Road, #9 in property damage totals, is just #47 in crash rate.

- The worst crash I ever saw was the fuel truck that flipped over into the Bourne Rotary last winter. It had the huge-truck-crashing props, as well as the spilled-fuel aspect. I only moved down here in 2005, though.

- Feel free to tell us about the worst accident you have ever seen on Cape Cod in the comments below.

Nobska Light, Falmouth MA

Nobska Light, aka Nobska Point Light or Nobsque Light, is a 42 foot tall tower in Falmouth, Massachusetts. I assume it is named after some guy named Nobsque.

It sits on the southwestern tip of Cape Cod, at the junction of Buzzards Bat and Vineyard Sound. If you wish to be specific, it is in the Woods Hole section of Falmouth.

It went up in 1826, with the tower originally protruding from the house of the light keeper . It was replaced in 1876 with the setup you see in these pictures.

Nobska Light was run by the US Lighthouse Service until 1939, when ownership was given to the US Coast Guard. It was automated in 1985 and the keeper was retired. Joseph Hindley, who ran it from 1978 to 1982, may have been the last civilian lighthouse keeper in New England. It is now the house of whoever is the Commanding Officer of the Southeastern New England sector of the Coast Guard.

Bye, Nobska!

South Coast Surf Check, 9/14/18

South Coast Surf Check is back...

Hurricane Florence was still sending surf at us Friday, so we immediately dispatched teams to Westport, Falmouth and even Little Compton, Rhode Island to get to the bottom of this.

Every day of summer is a Dog Day when you're at the beach.

We started in Westport, at Horseneck Beach.

Horseneck Beach is good for shooting just-missed-us hurricane surf, as the Cape and Islands blocks the rest of the South Coast from a storm that is hitting, say, Carolina.

If I try shooting storm surf anywhere else on the South Coast, I come back with Nathan. See the shot of Falmouth (not South Coast, but island-protected) for an example at the end of the article). Horseneck Beach will be in every South Coast Surf Check article that we do.

It is also a popular beach with surfers, although I watched a bunch of surfers yesterday for an hour and didn't see one worthy ride. It was more of a wetsuit social club out there.

Time for the next town...

Little Compton, Rhode Island

We hit South Shore Beach. Note that in Rhodey, the South Shore is actually the southern shore of the state. In Massachusetts, it is the eastern shore because... well, because f*** you.

As if the bus wasn't cool enough, he had two cages in there, one with a giant tropical bird and one with what appeared to be a falcon. I would have hung around and got shots of that, but I didn't feel like talking to a hippy. Nothing against hippies, I just had a lot of ground to cover.

(Straight Outta) Little Compton should have a NWA museum, as well as a guy from NWA as a Selectman.  I bet that MC Ren works cheap these days.

We generally don't get to Rhode Island much, as it is just out of our coverage area. There are those who count Little Compton and Tiverton, which are in Rhode Island, as being part of the South Coast region of Massachusetts.  I am not one of those people... unless the surf is up.

Business took us to Falmouth next, so they snuck into the article. The lighthouse below, which is the next thing that we plan to do an article on, sort of snuck into this article as a preview .

Hurricane Inundation Map: Falmouth

The maps are a bit blurry, because they download poorly and we were forced to take pictures of the monitor.

They work like this...

Any area that is colored in means that inundation is possible during a hurricane. FEMA estimates as to what hurricane intensity would be needed to flood certain spots are shown by color differencs.

Light green = Category 1

Dark green = Category 2

Yellow = Category 3

Red = Category 4

Click on the map to zoom in.